I wrote this column in 1997 to explain my take on the Christmas season, and Epiphany. More than a decade later, my feelings haven't changed:

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
January 6, 1997 Monday Metro Edition

LETTING GO OF CHRISTMAS, HOLDING ON TO HOPE

Epiphany. Twelfth Day.

You go to the supermarket, and the cardboard Santas that sold low-fat chips have disappeared.

You drive through Fayetteville or Fairmount or down any city street, and the trees already are lined along the curb, tinsel blowing like battered streamers, somber children kicking needles as they trudge off to school.

Epiphany. In some nations it remains a day of revelation, a time to remember the coming of the Magi, the moment when the yuletide explodes into new hope.

Personally, it's one more chance to let my mother down.

In a few months, on the calendar, she'll be gone 10 years. She was a true believer in the Epiphany. She had a Christmas structure that she rebuilt each year. You did not decorate the house until Dec. 15. You did not put up the tree until Dec. 20.

And you took nothing down - not a thing - until the Epiphany.

This was sometimes a hard schedule to accept. Many of my friends had their trees up right after Thanksgiving, and the tree - to a kid - is proof of what is coming. My mother never budged. Her reasoning was that Christmas was not a day but a philosophy, that Christmas should not end on Dec. 25.

For a few years, she balked at throwing away our tree at all. We would take it down on Jan. 6, the ornaments would all go into a box, and my parents would drag the tree into the back yard. They would wire it up to the clothespole, and for the rest of the winter it became a bird feeder.

In January and February we hung suet for the starlings and the sparrows, and you could look out the window, and it would bring you back to Christmas. Finally, in the spring, we would drag the dry and brittle hulk out to the curb, and leave it there for the ever-patient garbage men. Even then it was a very sad day. Because the tree was part of Christmas, and we were letting go.

Looking back, of course, that was the whole point. My mother was an orphan, a product of grinding Depression poverty. As a girl, the people she loved died all around her. Then her own first child died as a toddler, and she was left with a couple of ways to go. You stepped down into despair, or you believed in Christmas.

Which she did. She used the holiday as a bonfire, seeking out gifts even in the summer months, milking every moment she could from the season. During the Vietnam years, when I was a boy, we would go for long drives in late January, hunting for front windows that still held Christmas trees.

When we'd spot one, my old man would idle the car. My mother would turn to us and explain how those parents probably had someone in the war, how maybe their kid was coming home on leave, how the tree would be waiting when that soldier walked in.

In the back seat, in the dark, you felt that Christmas never ends.

By the time I was in high school, the cigarettes had started their patient, relentless siege against my mother. At night, she would lie in bed and for a long time she would cough. She also had started to give each of us a small gift on Jan. 6, and I sensed almost a kind of desperate lesson.

She hated phoniness and false cheer, the bogus and plastic nature of the holiday. Whatever was real about Christmas was latent, not contrived. A day would come, as she had learned, when you would need that gift all year.

So today is the Twelfth Day. I still hear my mother's voice, but I do not always respond. We put our tree up early because it makes our own kids happy. Many times, I confess, it comes down before today. But this year, by chance, our tree was still up Sunday night.